Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

The boy didn’t say anything.

When Sully pulled out of the alley onto Main, he said, “You know what?”

When the boy didn’t answer, Sully nudged him. “Grandpa loves you too.”

Will frowned. “Grandpa Ralph?”

“No,” Sully said. “Grandpa Me.”

“I know,” the boy said.

The damndest thing about what Sully’d said, he realized, was that it was true. He enjoyed having his grandson around. The first morning Peter had appeared for work with Will in tow, Sully’d let it be known that it wasn’t such a great idea. “He won’t get in the way,” Peter had promised, his voice lowered.

“That’s not the point,” Sully’d responded, though it was the point, or a large part of the point. “What if he gets hurt?”

“How?”

“Suppose you whack a nail off center and it flies through the air and catches him in the eye. Your mother will have both our asses.”

Peter shook his head. “Well, what do you know? My father is worried something might fly through the air and hit his grandson.”

“Okay,” Sully said. “You don’t want me to worry about him, I won’t.”

“Worry all you want,” Peter had said. “It’s a little out of character, is all I’m saying.”

“I never worried about you, is that what you’re saying?”

“Hey,” Peter said, shrugging his shoulders significantly.

And he was right, of course. Sully hadn’t worried about Peter once during his entire childhood. Partly because he’d had his own worries. Partly because Vera could worry enough for ten people. Partly because he just hadn’t. He’d neglected to, not feeling much need, even glad to be out of the picture, telling himself during moments of self-pity (self-knowledge?) that if he were involved in his son’s life it would probably be to fuck things up.

That had been his attitude at the time, and in truth it had not felt as unnatural as this new attitude, this tightness of the heart he felt for his grandson, as if some natural, biological affection were coming to him late, after skipping a generation.

“Anyhow,” Peter had remarked, “we don’t have much choice.”

The reason they didn’t, Peter explained, was that Vera was working mornings at the stationer’s, a job she’d taken after Ralph’s first visit to the hospital.

“What about Ralph?” Sully said. “Don’t tell me he’s going back to work too.”

“He offered to watch Will, but …”

“But?”

Peter had explained later, when the boy wasn’t around, that Will hadn’t wanted to stay alone in the house with Grandpa Ralph, who, the boy knew, had recently been in the hospital. He was afraid his grandfather would die while the others were away, that he’d be alone in the house with a dead man until everybody returned. Maybe that was part of Sully’s strange affection for the boy, who seemed to Sully a quivering collection of terrible, unnecessary fears. Also, Ralph had a lot of running around to do. His work with the lions, the Parks Commission.

Instead of joining Rub and Peter at the Miles Anderson house, Sully swung by Carl Roebuck’s office. It had been a couple days since he’d seen Carl, who’d made an elliptical reference to the possibility of work. With an unpaid-for truck, Sully couldn’t afford to ignore any elliptical references. He parked the truck in the street below and, with Will in tow, climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor, figuring that if Carl was not there — always a distinct possibility — maybe he’d be able to find out where he was from Ruby, who might be wearing her see-through blouse again, always a heartwarming spectacle, that. To his surprise, Ruby wasn’t there. Toby Roebuck was, though she wasn’t wearing anything see-through. What she had on was a bulky gray sweatshirt of the sort that usually said “property of” some college athletic department. What did it mean, Sully wondered, that he preferred the sight of Toby Roebuck in a bulky sweatshirt to Ruby, a young woman not without physical charms, in a see-through blouse? It meant, he suspected, that he was sixty. And a fool. And maybe other things too, none of them good. No matter what it meant, he was glad to see her there at Ruby’s desk with the phone to her ear and apparently in good spirits, to judge from the grin she flashed him. She motioned to the two chairs behind the coffee table.

“I’ll tell him, Clyde,” she was saying. “No guarantees. You know how he is …”

Sully ignored the invitation to sit down but stuck his head inside Carl’s inner office. No Carl.

Toby hung up the phone, stared at Sully. “I heard you’d made another career move,” she said. “You smell like grease.”

Sully had been all set to comment on her own apparent career move before being beaten to the punch. Also, it was disquieting to note how often women commented upon how he smelled right up front, before hello even.

“It’s a terrible thing to have so many talents,” he told her.

“Who’s this?” she said, examining Will, whose existence Sully had momentarily forgotten under Toby Roebuck’s influence.

“My grandson,” he told her, then to Will, “Say hi to Mrs. Roebuck.”

Will, shy as always, murmured something like a hello.

“I hadn’t even gotten used to the idea that you had a son yet,” Toby observed, “and here you are a grandfather. Hard to imagine.”

“My son said almost the same thing this morning,” he admitted. “What’s the deal? Is Ruby sick?”

She made a face. “Alas, Ruby is no more, having tendered her resignation last Friday. I should have warned her that resignation would be the outcome.”

“Where’d she go?”

She shrugged. “We could follow the trail of mascara …”

“Let’s not,” Sully suggested. “It’s pretty discouraging to think about so many girls crying over your husband. I know since women’s lib we’re not supposed to say that women are stupid, but the way they all fall for Carl kind of suggests it.”

“You think they should all fall for you?”

“Not all,” Sully said. “But if Carl can fool them all, I ought to be able to fool one or two.”

“You aren’t fooling Ruth any more?”

Sully ignored the question behind the question. In fact, he had not seen Ruth in three weeks, since Janey’s husband, Roy, shot up the wrong house and put Janey into the hospital with a broken jaw and a severe concussion. Somehow, Ruth had construed the entire series of events to be Sully’s fault. That was the message she’d delivered bright and early the next morning, before he was completely awake even. It had not been one of their usual arguments, carried on in private, in some motel room or the front seat of Sully’s pickup. She’d suddenly just materialized there at Hattie’s before he’d even loaned Rub his first dollar of the day, before he’d taken a sip of his coffee, before he’d even gotten to square one in the business of figuring out what he was going to say to Ruth when he ran into her. He had only just finished hearing about the events in question from a still badly shaken Miss Beryl a few minutes before. In fact, the part of the problem he was working on there at Hattie’s was whether to go looking for Ruth or let her find him. On general principle he hated to go looking for trouble, but he was also aware that trouble could get worse if you let it find you. And here it was before he could decide. He hadn’t even been aware of Ruth at first, just that the lunch counter had gone silent, as if everyone were holding his breath.

And when he turned and saw who it was at his shoulder, it wasn’t Ruth’s sudden presence that concerned him so much as her appearance. She looked like a woman who’d lost what remained of her youth over night. She looked every day of her forty-eight-plus years, and there was something terrible about her expression, too, as if she herself realized that she’d lost, decisively, some great battle she’d been waging, and was glad, now that she’d thought about it, to have lost it.